6 - Mysterious Skin - Repressed Memory and UFOs

In Mysterious Skin, the character Brian is convinced that they were abducted by aliens around the age of eight, but were actually sexually assaulted by the baseball coach. His trauma took the form of repressed memory, and these gaps in his memory would be filled by the alluring story of alien abduction. His obsession with alien abductions and learning more about it would eventually "lead" him to find the same person who was molested alongside him. 

Repressed memories from traumatic events such as sexual assault forms these false memories often around cultural icons that are highly alluring and alien abductions is definitely one of them--every detail to make up for its falsity works perfectly with the story it crafts, especially when considering the repressed memory beneath it influencing its formation. 

Mysterious Skin uses this character as a parallel to Neil's trauma formation, who was very aware of their assault and chose to almost embrace it by having sex with lots of older men at a young age, and these two stories/people finding their way to each other in the end feels like two oppositely charged particles colliding (especially when you remember they both were together when assaulted).

I really liked this movie and the alluring and eerie concept of UFO abduction is fascinating and not lost on me (I watch UFO sighting videos still, even if they're obviously faked). Repressed memory syndrome is also very interesting, as it is usually takes highly fascinating subjects/symbols as the replacement memory, which can then form around the actual repressed memory pretty well, which makes the idea of the person with the trauma "writing" their memory around the repressed one even more interesting.